Oh the Rats, Rats, Rats, Rats, Rats!

Mr. C left this morning on a long trip to New Hampshire, but before he left we had two days of meetings about Draft IV (he's calling it draft III* but it's sufficiently advanced for me to call it IV) and what I've been working on since Italy.  

In the new draft, the tertiary characters of rats take on a much larger and creepier role.  Apparently some daddy rats eat their children shortly after they are born.  It's a metaphor.

The mystery surrounding the rats comes to a head in a song that Roderick sings while going mental during the storm sequence.  It's called "Ode to Rats" and is in two movements.  As Roderick describes it, "it is to be performed by a choir of a thousand counter-tenors and castrati."  For the purposes of the show, Roderick sings in falsetto.  I have written the first draft of the song, and it varies wildly between a childish little tune about rats and  an increasingly darker refrain which simply goes "Oh the rats, rats, rats, rats, rats, rats, rats!  Oh the rats, rats, rats, rats, rats!"  By the end of the song I was able to use the marking "scream/sing" which was my first use of that indication in music and quite a lot of fun.  

My favorite marking I ever used was in "A Suite for the Children, by the Devil, for Wind Symphony" in which I wrote, above a first trumpet line "struggle for survival," followed three bars later by "you lose."

I expect, at some point in the storm sequence, to be able to use something like that.